For years I’ve effectively taught leaders that there are four kinds of activities that consume our work time: Green Light work, Yellow Light work, Orange Light work and Red Light work.
When we think about all the ways we have to communicate with each other, and there are a bunch of them in the workplace setting, most communication modalities offer some possibility of messaging beyond the words we say.
Face-to-face communication, which has the biggest communication bandwidth, for example, lets us stuff a whole lot more information than just words into our message.
The Drama Queens (and Kings) at your office need to be the center of attention. They’re provocative, emotional and reactive. And they are highly skilled at getting everyone around them worked-up, frazzled and emotional (that’s how they stay at the center of attention).
Imagine you discover a significant problem at work; the kind you need approval from your boss to solve. So you work up a proposal, bring it to your boss, and wait for approval. You’re a problem solver, and that’s what problem solvers do, right? You find a problem and generate a solution.
Effective constructive criticism maintains a delicate balance. When criticism is too harsh, recipients shut down emotionally, get defensive, and fail to hear a word you say. When criticism is too soft, recipients fail to hear the message that they really do need to change.
We’ve all used behavioral interview questions—questions that ask job candidates to recount a past experience so we can assess their likely future performance. In theory, behavioral interview questions should work just fine (because past behavior is usually a decent predictor of future behavior).
Leadership IQ recently conducted a study involving over 30,000 employees. And among the many questions we asked was "When I really make a mistake, I immediately start looking for another chance to try again." You can see from the chart below that there's a lot of room for improvement on this issue...
One of the most common employee engagement survey questions is "I recommend this company as a great organization to work for." So the employee engagement data below comes from a survey of 20,216 people from various size organizations. What you can see from the interactive chart is how organization size is related to employee engagement scores.
